KVIFF 2025: Rebuilding
Josh O'Connor is excellent as a downtrodden rancher who lost everything in a wildfire, but elsewhere this portrait of community and resilience is sentimental and thinly sketched
Rebuilding has a good heart. It believes in the kindness of strangers. It believes in community. It believes people who’ve lost everything can overcome. And unfortunately, it believes in drenching these ideas in sentimental guitar strings to sock all these points across.
The sturdy centre of Max Walker-Silverman’s empathetic second feature is Colorado cowboy Dusty, played by English actor Josh O’Connor, who looks the part in his Stetson and boots. His ranch was recently engulfed in a huge wildfire, along with several other homesteads in the area, and the scorched land won’t be viable as farmland for at least eight years or so. Dusty now has two options. He could live in a leaky trailer provided by the state and take a minimum wage road crew job (the brief snatches we see of him at work suggest he’s some sort of cattle lollipop man) – or he can start afresh in Montana on his cousin’s farm. The latter would mean being far away from his precocious daughter, Callie Rose (Lily LaTorre), who lives one town over with her mother, Ruby (Meghann Fahy).
Dusty only conforms to the Western stereotype in his apparel. He’s not really a man of action. For most of the film, he’s a hangdog figure who seems resigned to his fate. O’Connor has shown himself to be an intensely physical actor in films like God’s Own Country and Challengers, and similarly here he’s acting with his whole body. Dusty seems to physically shrink in an early scene where his remaining herd gets sold off at auction, and later, when the bank rejects his loan application, he crumbles completely. Like many blue-collar workers, so much of his identity is tangled up with his job. Who is he if he isn’t Dusty the cowboy? Can he handle simply being a single dad called Thomas (his real name)?
Aesthetically, Rebuilding resembles the western fables of Chloé Zhao and Kelly Reichardt but doesn’t quite match the specificity of place and depth of character in those filmmakers' work. Similar to the likes of Nomadland and First Cow, Rebuilding is lyrical and slow-moving, but despite the laconic pace, there’s frustratingly little revealed about its characters. Dusty’s relationship with his family could do with fleshing out. Why is he and his daughter estranged at the beginning of the movie? Why didn’t things work out with Ruby? Even when we discover they had their first date aged 12, there’s little sense of shared history between the characters, with the actors’ chemistry providing the connective tissue. Loosely sketched too is the ramshackle crew of people that Dusty forms a makeshift neighbourhood with at the trailer park.
The recent memory of the wildfires that ravaged California gives Rebuilding some secondhand heft, and the cast, including Kali Reis as Tempe, the salt of the earth single mother who welcomes Dusty into the trailer park community, are uniformly excellent, even when they’re reciting dialogue that sounds like it’s lifted from a twee country ballad. But like a country ballad, there’s something undeniably moving in Rebuilding’s almost naive hopefulness. Does it deliver a convincing depiction of America today? Not at all. Do I wish this version of America existed? 100%.
Rebuilding had its international premiere at Karlovy Vary International Film Festival 2025